Should Robot Cars Be Programmed To Kill You If It Will Save More Lives?

A curious thought experiment has made a lot of people nervous about the possibility of travelling in self-driving cars. More nervous than, you know, just getting in one in the first place.

Proposed by Patrick Lin, an associate philosophy professor at California Polytechnic State University, it goes something like this:

Say a robotic car -- which exist, by the way - is driving you happily along a mountain road, and then a tire blows sending you into oncoming traffic. If the car still has a modicum of control, it may have a simple choice to make. On one hand it could continue in its current path and slam into, say, a robotic SUV carrying parents and four happy kids. Or it could choose to send you over a cliff, killing you but saving the family car.

So what should it do?

The point being, if a robotic car can either choose to kill four people or one, should it be programmed to choose to betray its master?

It gets even more complicated when you take it out of the realm of pure ethics - the classic trolley problem - and into programming decisions. How much should the car be able to assess potential fatalities and alter its course accordingly? Should it know the difference between a bus, a car and a motorcycle? Should it take into account the age of the potential victims, or the chances of recovery?

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Should your robotic car kill you if it could save more lives?

Indeed, as another researcher Noah Goodall asks, should the car be able to tell which motorcyclist of two is wearing a helmet - and if so, which should it target? What if one of the motorcyclists is carrying a kidney? What if... What if...

"For the foreseeable future, what’s important isn’t just about arriving at the “right” answers to difficult ethical dilemmas, as nice as that would be. But it’s also about being thoughtful about your decisions and able to defend them–it’s about showing your moral math.

"In ethics, the process of thinking through a problem is as important as the result. Making decisions randomly, then, evades that responsibility. Instead of thoughtful decisions, they are thoughtless, and this may be worse than reflexive human judgments that lead to bad outcomes."

In this sense the debates also apply to the (for now theoretical) concept of killer robots, currently being debated at the UN for the very first time. If these self-targeting war bots are so efficient as to cause "superfluous or unnecessary suffering" they could by definition be in violation of human rights treaties. So should they be programmed to have a level of inaccuracy built in, and if so what's the point?

Sofge quotes Michael Cahill, a law professor and vice dean at Brooklyn Law School, who sums the debate up nicely:

"The beauty of robots is that they don’t have relationships to anybody. They can make decisions that are better for everyone. But if you lived in that world, where robots made all the decisions, you might think it’s a dystopia."

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11 Disappointing Jetpacks

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Early Individual Lift Devices started out rather pedestrian. The De Lackner was pretty much an upside-down helicopter but the big advantage was in how it was controlled. The pilot leaned the way he wanted to go – he just had to do it carefully so as not to fall into the counter-rotating blades beneath his feet.

Hiller flying platforms were also held aloft by large spinning blades beneath the operator but they were housed in a duct which made the platform look a little safer. Still, what could the operator accomplish while hovering?

Various companies pitched the notion of a “jump belt” wherein rocket blasts would push or lift a soldier across a battlefield. These bursts, measured in mere seconds, did not accomplish as much as one would have hoped considering the money spent developing them.

The Bell rocket belt was a major breakthrough. It allowed a pilot to fly for 21 seconds on a controlled blast of hydrogen peroxide generated steam. This is the device that was most widely publicized and became known to many as a “jet pack.”

Bell substituted a miniature jet engine for the hydrogen peroxide tanks and suddenly they had a device which could fly for minutes instead of just seconds. But, it was rather expensive to build and still took two hands to fly. What was the practical application?

Jet belt on the left, rocket belt on the right.

Searching for even longer flight times, developers modified the engine from the jet belt and built a platform around it. The WASP (Williams Aerial Systems Platform) allows for even longer flight times and can be flown by a non-pilot who simply leans the direction in which he wants to go. It is expensive and the military, again, wonders what the practical application is.

Meanwhile, hobbyists and others keep the rocket belt technology alive. Building the belts on their own, these entrepreneurs provide belts and pilots for flights on television shows and movies, and events like the 1984 Olympics opening ceremonies.

An inventor solves the problem of flight times by creating the Jet Lev, which tethers to a fuel supply, trading flight duration (longer) for freedom (less).

Swiss pilot Yves Rossy develops his flying wing, powered by miniature jet engines. He can fly vast distances at great speeds, but launches by dropping out of airplanes or helicopters.It is personal flight, but he cannot launch from the ground.

Meanwhile the rocket belts continue flying, now in the hands of professional rocket belt pilots and even some amateurs. Here, a professional pilot flies a belt owned by Go Fast! energy supplements.